Barn Burning

“Barn Burning” explores themes of loyalty, family, justice, and revenge. Set in the American South during Reconstruction, “Barn Burning” focuses on the Snopes family—struggling tenant farmers living on the fringes of the community due to the patriarch’s illegal activities. The primary conflict in the story concerns the protagonist, Sartoris Snopes, who is torn between loyalty to his father and his own sense of justice. Thematically, “Barn Burning” considers the moral gray area around blood loyalty, asking, is family loyalty more important than moral rightness? Faulkner’s study of loyalty and justice is multifaceted. Sartoris’s struggle is shown to be a human conflict that affects all areas of life, on an individual and communal level. Ultimately, Sartoris chooses justice over loyalty—and while his choice sets him free from his father’s criminality, Faulkner suggests that Sartoris can never escape the guilt and grief of family violence.

Sartoris’s emotional conflict is described as a rending, as though he is being torn in two: “corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses—gone, done with for ever and ever” (12). Despite his conflicted feelings, Sartoris loves and is emotionally loyal to his father, going so far as to see his father’s enemy as his own: “our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!” (1). It is clear from the narrator’s choice of words, particularly his use of repeated words such as “despair,” that Sartoris’s loyalty to his father is painful. Sartoris’s loyalty is not so much given to Snopes as it is demanded and taken, leaving Sartoris—as well as other characters, such as Mrs. Snopes—trapped in a sense of blood loyalty to a cruel man who cares more for revenge than he does for his family. For Sartoris, the despair and fear created by his father’s actions eventually begin to overcome his loyalty: “Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be” (12). Sartoris wants his father to be reprimanded so that he will stop the criminality that has harmed the Snopes family and everyone around them. Sartoris hopes that his father will stop his quest for revenge so that Sartoris’s loyalty does not continue to cause grief and pain. On an individual level, Faulkner suggests that loyalty cannot be demanded based on blood without exacting a cruel price. Even after Snopes is gone, his family inherits and must contend with the “grief” and “despair” his revenge has wrought.

Sartoris’s conflict takes place within a historical and cultural framework. “Barn Burning,” like many of Faulkner’s stories, is placed in a historical setting that is inextricable from the story’s themes. Although he demands loyalty from his family, Snopes is not loyal. He is out for his own interests (both during the war and after) so his loyalty extends to others only when their “interest lay with his” (4). As a deserter who fights only for his interests, Snopes represents the complicated “gray area” of loyalty. Snopes is loyal to no man, blood, or cause because revenge and pride mean more to him than his bonds to others, and Sartoris’s defection is shown to be the only choice because justice must trump loyalty to a family member whose actions serve only themselves.